The first in a series about the remote working habits of British accountants. Rob Lewis speaks to contractor Toni Brocklebank about trying to stay technologically up-to-date on the Isle of Man.
Toni Brocklebank moved to the Isle of Man to work for an off-shore banking practice before becoming a contract accountant. Still based on the island, she now works for two sole practitioners and has a few clients of her own.
“I work from offices, people’s houses, my own house, farms; there’s a lot of travelling around, although in a very small radius. The island is only about 30 by 11 miles after all, but I am at a lot of different locations.”
Until leaving the practice two and a half years ago, Brocklebank had always worked in a large office environment. Remote working had never been an issue, and then suddenly it was a necessity. Brocklebank dealt with it the way most accountants would.
“I wouldn’t describe myself as a teleworking pioneer,” she says. “I probably rely heavily on a laptop and a mobile phone. They’re the tools I use most.” When she began working for herself she got a laptop and a desktop from Acer as part of a small business package, and there have been no problems with them thus far.
For her home office, Brocklebank didn’t see the need to set up a network, although both her computers are wi-fi enabled. Instead she uses “data pens”, or USB memory sticks, which she says are “tremendously useful”. You can use the laptop on-site, and even leave it there, if it’s a secure environment, and just bring the stick home with you. While it may not impress lovers of cutting-edge computing, it’s a cheap and simple solution to the issues of data transfer and data storage. Most now come with password protection as standard, which probably makes them a great deal more secure than some other alternatives. Data protection on the desktop comes in the form of the ubiquitous Norton Anti-Virus, while the laptop uses AVG, which is downloadable for free. Both programmes have proven to be equally successful, she says.
Last year, she finally decided to take things a step further, and bought her first PDA. “It’s a HP6615,” she says “and I got it second-hand from e-bay for £130. I got it with the intention of perhaps having more access to the internet and e-mail, but I haven’t really needed it. For whiz kids I’m sure it’s got lots of benefits, but when you’re actually in a profession like accountancy it’s not that useful as a tool. You can’t run a spreadsheet on a PDA.”
Nowadays its biggest practical application is a rather glamorous diary and appointments book. It may have Word, Excel, and the internet, but with a three-inch screen it hardly makes for a natural workstation, even if it could run QuickBooks and Sage. Brocklebank admits it’s great for quick internet access, but if you have a laptop with you, it adds nothing extra. The HP6615’s built-in Tom Tom satellite navigation is also of minimal benefit to a long-term Manx resident.
“It’s probably more for fun,” she confesses. “From a business perspective they’ve got a long way to go yet.”
Did she yearn for the day when PDAs become more practical, then? What technological development was she hoping for most? “The only thing I need to develop is me, really,” Brocklebank says. “Excel is the application I most use, and I could always do with more training on that. Applications are more important than hardware.”